Observations of a Digitally Enlightened Mind

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Reuven Cohen

So apparently a group of technologists and vendors working under the cloak of digital darkness drew out a pentagram and locked arms as they called out to Cthulhu to manifest and drive out those that would oppose their ultimate aims of total and complete world domination. Domination brought about through a set of cloud computing solutions that would revolutionize antiquated IT infrastructures and deliver agility, scalability, and operational efficiencies through an open platform at a really, really good price. Blood was spilled, virgins were killed, and apparently an “open” cloud-computing manifesto was drafted. Continue reading →

This basically means that we should distribute the sampling, detection and prevention functions across the entire networked ecosystem, not just to dedicated security appliances; each of the end nodes should communicate using a standard signaling and telemetry protocol so that common threat, vulnerability and effective disposition can be communicated up and downstream to one another and one or more management facilities.

I also wrote about this concept in a series of post on swarm intelligence…

The only viable option for collective intelligence in the future is through the use of intelligent agents, which can perform some base level of analysis against internal and environmental variables and communicate that information to the collective without the need for centralized processing and distribution. Essentially the intelligent agents would support cognition, cooperation, and coordination among themselves built on a foundation of dynamic policy instantiation. Without the use of distributed computing, parallel processing and intelligent agents there is little hope for moving beyond the brittle and highly ineffective defenses currently deployed.

Once the agent is fully aware of the state of devices it resides on, physical or virtual, it will need to expand its knowledge of the environment it resides in and it’s relative positioning to others. Knowledge of self, combined with knowledge of the environment expands the context in which agents could effect change. In communication with other agents the response to threats or other problems would be more efficiently identified, regardless of location.

As knowledge of self moves to communication with others there is the foundation for inter-device cooperation. Communication and cooperation between seemingly disparate devices, or device clusters, creates collective intelligence. This simple model creates an extremely powerful precedent for dealing with a wide range of information technology and security problems.

Driving the intelligent agents would be a lightweight and adaptable policy language that would be easily interpreted by the agent’s policy engine. New polices would be created and shared between the agents and the system would move from simply responding to changes and begin to adapt on its own. The collective and the infrastructure will learn. This would enable a base-level of cognition where seemingly benign events or state changes coupled with similarly insignificant data could be used to lessen the impact of disruptions or incidents, sometimes before they even occur.

The concept of distributed intelligence and self-healing infrastructure will have a major impact on a highly mobile world of distributed computing devices, it will also form the foundation for how we deal with the loss of visibility and control of the “in the cloud” virtual storage and data centers that service them.